InfoPath is the official name of Microsoft’s forthcoming XML document authoring tool, formerly code-named XDocs. InfoPath, which has a tentative mid-2003 release date (although as of mid-Feb. 2003 it had not yet been released to beta), is a forms-based XML authoring tool that will be marketed as part of the Office family of products, although it might not be bundled with the core Office suite. The company announced the new name at a conference of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, which had on its agenda the growing adoption of XML as a format for exchanging medical data.

InfoPath can use arbitrary XML schema as the basis for new XML-formatted documents, and it outputs data in standard XML format. Developers can embed script in InfoPath forms to implement custom business logic. As demonstrated at the conference, the product can also use the ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) data access API to populate form fields with data from popular database products (including non-Microsoft databases) and update data in databases.

The main InfoPath site is www.microsoft.com/office/preview/infopath. For more information about the product's goals, see "XDocs Delivers Office XML Interface" on page 12 of the Nov. 2002 Update.